Thursday, May 15, 2014

Am American living in France and pretending to be a doctor is sentenced to three years and a huge fine “on a charge of fraud in connection with the sale of a vibratory massage instrument.”

Gen. Funston, the US Army’s military ruler of Vera Cruz, cleans up the town, every house and gutter, every mosquito eradicated, or so he claims. He announces prison terms of 20 days for not burning garbage, 10 for allowing cesspools to form, and 5 for spitting. Gambling is also banned.

Federal troops stop scab miners entering the Colorado coal fields. The military says it will stop miners imported by the coal companies but not men who come voluntarily seeking work. No way the companies can figure out how to exploit that loophole.

At a court martial, a first lieutenant of the Colorado militia admits that militia fired into the tents in the strikers’ camp in Ludlow, but he says the miners shot first. Doesn’t say why shooting down women and children was better than, I don’t know, moving back. Courts-martial of 39 national guardsmen are planned. The UMW is refusing to participate.

I meant to mention this much earlier: there’s a book about the Ludlow Massacre, which I haven’t read, called The Great Coalfield War. What’s curious is that one of the authors is George McGovern, and he published it (a reworking of his PhD dissertation) in 1972 while he was running for president.

Headline of the Day -100: “Bomb At Garden Party.” As entertainment at a fundraising party for the Army Relief Society. The bomb is a patented invention for aerial combat: one plane drops the bomb, attached to piano wire, onto the other one, which it grips with hooks. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are on the guest list.

For-realsies aerial bombardment is going on in Mexico. Carranza’s nephew drops bombs on a Federal gunboat and claims to have done more damage than he probably did. The dropping of high explosives from planes is banned by the Second Hague Conference, but Mexico never signed that one. Neither did most of the countries that will be at war in a few months.

Plans to celebrate Peace Day in Baltimore schools are abandoned when the school board bans “the propaganda of ‘peace at any price.’”

The Women’s Social and Political Union introduces this famous poster for the Ipswich by-election: